Hidden treasures in museums here and abroad

There was something about the Victorian age — the age of discovery and enlightenment — that caused explorers and collectors to amass huge quantities of artifacts and specimens, often beyond their immediate scientific or commercial need.

Many of these artifacts and collections were donated to museums or fledgling institutions that, later on, turned them into both educational ephemera as well as helped create some of the world’s most prestigious museums.

The American Museum of Natural History became a great museum precisely because Teddy Roosevelt (and others) sent back thousands of crates of animal hides, samples of grasses, stuffed birds, pinned insects and all sorts of local rocks, sand and weeds — all of which were made into the dioramas that are still the best museum exhibits ever mounted anywhere. Want to go to Africa? Take a walk through the African Hall. Believe me, as one who has been to Africa, it is the cheapest true safari you could ever take.

Part of the problem for museums is the sheer bulk of material these explorers sent back. When I was a kid, the Museum of the American Indian on the Upper East Side of Manhattan housed a startling collection of Indian stuff.

I say stuff because it was often so stuffed into glass display cases that one case 6 feet wide and as tall would have upward of 400 priceless artifacts from one American Indian tribe.

The museum was on four floors in a Fifth Avenue ex-mansion, each floor (as well as the landings) packed with these glass cases … the amount of stuff was prodigious.

And what’s more, they had a warehouse in the Bronx with 10 times as much material, most of it unsorted, untagged, sitting there with the collectors notes, one day to become visible (if the money could be found).

A decade or more back, presto, the Smithsonian absorbed it all, closed the New York museum and moved everything to Washington. Now, what to do? Ah, the National Museum of the American Indian was born.

So large is the collection they still haven’t finished the curatorial work. And so important is this collection in tracing this continent’s people, culture and history that they have satellite museums all over the country where traveling exhibits give people a chance to share in the found treasure.

Meanwhile, the British Museum (perhaps the oldest and most wide-ranging collection) has decided to expand the public’s awareness of the treasures they hold by focusing on the history of man one artifact at a time.

In a genius radio series called “A History of the World in 100 Objects,†they take one object from each time period to demonstrate the culture and advancement of mankind. Riveting stuff, often from an artifact as small as a Roman coin or a Mayan carving. Listen in online at bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/.

There are so many basements and warehouses loaded with artifacts and finds, most of which have yet to be studied with modern techniques, that, with the right research and experts, perhaps twice as many museums could be opened in the near future.

All this needs funding, to be sure, but my point is that human knowledge has always been built on evidence, investigation and study after collection of material. Museums and private collectors have tons and tons more artifacts than can ever be studied in one lifetime by an army of experts. Archeology and related fields are golden opportunities for tomorrow’s graduates.

Our knowledge is expanding, changing, improving as we re-evaluate and re-examine that which has already been amassed. Last year someone working with a NASA moon sample made a simple find proving water once reacted with the rock sample (meaning the moon may have had water on it long ago). That changes all that we know about the formation of our early solar system.

In the basement of the French Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle they found an 80-year-old squid sample that, it turns out, allowed them to isolate the DNA for the giant squid, a creature so elusive, so large, that no one, to date, has ever seen one of the really big ones alive (on camera; they are very deep underwater).

Meanwhile in the Volkerkund Museum (museum of mankind) in Berlin they examined the bone handles of a mid-19th century East Coast Indian knife and found evidence of rust — meaning the Indians had early iron-age technology (and on Route 22 by Wassaic, you can see two kilns the settlers took over, the cores of which pre-date the Mayflower).

Museums are like a treasure trove for the really serious explorer. For the explorer expert they can serve to bolster or overhaul current belief and understanding. For you, the explorer curious, they can open up a whole new world of possibilities, found in the smallest artifact, the newest traveling exhibit, or, yes, even in that giant T. rex looming overhead.

No matter where you get inspiration from, walking though a vast collection of treasure is always certain to enthrall and illuminate.

Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.